An engrossing, satisfying account of the development and disintegration of a lesser-known immigrant community.
Two 18th-century German families risk everything to join a pioneer movement in hopes of forging a better future.
It’s the late 1700s, and 12-year-old Karl Schuler lives in a small town in what is now southwestern Germany. He’s orphaned and sent to a local miller, where he learns a trade and grows up. As he begins to plan his own family, he learns of a government program sponsoring migration to the frontier territory along the Danube River—almost 1,000 miles away. With new wife Inge, he begins the long journey to a new life. Miles away in Eastern Bavaria, Peter Mueller, a farmer and cabinetmaker, struggles to support his family in the face of failed crops and high rents. He also hears that the government is offering free land to those willing to work hard for a fresh start. Leaving in the dead of night to avoid his nobleman landlord, Peter; his wife, Katherine; and their four children set out for the Danube. The two families only intersect briefly on the arduous journey to their new homes, but both show determination and deep humanity as they become part of an extensive German immigrant community on the Serbian border. Six generations later, this community finds itself facing daunting, life-changing challenges as the rise of German fascism creates deep divisions in their new homeland. Fischer’s plain writing style ably animates the various ethnic groups of the Serbian frontier. He skillfully weaves together social history, historical events, and details of day-to-day life, from the workings of an 18th-century grain mill to the construction of a feather mattress in the 1930s. Tender stories of familial love and the joys and losses of pioneer life yield greater themes of belonging and alienation, the atrocities of war, and the complexity of ethnic and national loyalties. If the central characters seem sometimes too upright and decent to be absolutely believable, it’s easily forgiven against the backdrop of the challenges they face.
An engrossing, satisfying account of the development and disintegration of a lesser-known immigrant community.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 678
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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